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Preview Form Autofill in Firefox Nightly

Tue, 05/23/2017 - 10:30 — matthew

An early version of the new Form Autofill feature is ready for testing by early adopters with U.S. addresses and websites using Firefox Nightly on desktop. Form Autofill helps you fill out addresses in online forms. You can give the work-in-progress a try and watch it improve over time but keep in mind there are many more months of work left to go.

Firefox has an existing form history feature, which helps you fill out one field at a time using frecency. In contrast, Form Autofill completes all related address fields when you select a suggestion from the autocomplete dropdown on the focused field. Autofill profiles can contain one or more of the following: name, mailing address, phone number, and/or email. Multiple profiles are supported, so, for example, you can have separate personal and work profiles.

What's currently supported

Basic address profile management for addresses that follow United States formats. For now you need to use this interface to create profiles for testing

Coming soon on Nightly

Heuristics to determine field data types when @autocomplete isn't used. This will make autofill work on many more sites.

In-content add/edit dialog UX

Support for <select> dropdowns

Automatic saving of submitted addresses and prompts to confirm changes after autofilling

Showing a preview of what will be autofilled upon highlighting an address in the autocomplete dropdown

Full UI translation

Before release

Support for credit cards

More data validation and cleansing

Sync between desktops with your Firefox Account

Significantly improved heuristics… there is a lot of work to do here yet

Support for more countries based on feedback from our localization communities

Support for data transformations on more types e.g. splitting a phone number into country code, area code, exchange, and number when required by sites

UI polish

Telemetry to measure accuracy of autofilled data as a quality metric

Try it out

To give Form Autofill a try, make sure you’re running Firefox Nightly and open Privacy preferences (you can type about:preferences#privacy in the address bar). Click the “Saved Profiles…” button beside “Enable Profile Autofill” and then click “Add” and save a new address. Then visit our demo page or othersites using the HTML5 autocomplete attribute, and you should see the autofill dropdown as seen in the image above.